A diary of my experiences in Eve Online, an online game of Internet Spaceships, pew-pew, trading, thieving, back-stabbing, hunting and exploration

Monday, September 9, 2013

Forward with Faction Warfare

As I was tidying up my buy/sell order prices for the millionth time, I received a chat request. I was 99% sure it would be another "join my corp" conversation that I'd probably ignore, but this person started with exactly what I wanted to hear. "We make argh million ISK per hour running faction warfare plexes". And given what I said in my last post, that I wanted to try combat without being the only target on the field, I couldn't really say no, could I?

It's a small corp called Brave Little Bandits. They're based at Arnon, which suits me since that is where I'm based too. I looked over their suggested Incursus fit and, with the exception of a few requirements, I think I can fly it well enough to participate. I needed to study Hull Upgrades to Level 4 so that I could learn the four skills that will make the armor more effective. I've set up buy orders to obtain the modules required, since I've got a feeling I'll be getting blown up a lot, since my job will be to orbit the enemy vessels at Very Close Range.

While that is going on, my trade in XR-3200 missile bays is going pretty well and also in Faint Epsilon Warp Scramblers. I've set up buy orders on them and those are being filled at a good rate.

I completed manufacturing a bunch of antimatter ammo and that's now selling pretty steadily at Arnon. There's a price spike happening at the moment; it was 23 ISK a couple of weeks ago and now running around 30, which suits me just fine :)

Tip o' the cap to the pilot who joined me in taking out a Serpentis Hidden Hideaway and graciously abandoned the wrecks. I got lucky and found a Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler in one of them! About 2M ISK right there.

Sisters of Eve arc completed

I completed the Sisters of Eve Epic Arc, "The Blood Stained Stars". Best find: a 12.5M ISK laser turret, now for sale in Amarr space somewhere. When I picked it up I zipped back to the station ASAP and put up a sell order immediately. Too nervous to fly around with that in my cargo!

As for the arc itself, it was mostly easy until it came to Dagan on mission 49. Having read a lot of reports about how tough he was and that you needed at least 100-110 DPS, I hoped my Algos would be able to deliver. My 150 DPS included the ship itself, but if I got too close I'd be under attack. I considered asking in local for assistance, but in the end decided to try it alone first.

I sent in my 5 Hobgoblin I drones to start the fight and they were tanked by Dagan. They didn't get shot at, but they weren't able to take down his shields for long. I'm using 75mm Compressed Coil guns with Shadow Faction Iron ammo and had a 12km optimal range, so I orbited at 12km and started shooting. That did the trick! Dagan was dead in 5 min and hit me with nothing more than a target painter.

Probing game is working again!

Having joined a FW corp, I had visions of being swarmed by Caldari militia whenever I undocked, but of course Concord is out there all the time and would shoot such ruffians as they showed up. So I undocked my swiss army knife ship this morning and went out to test the fixes to the probing system that CCP released this morning. Hooray! The red dots are back! I picked up 10 lost Hobgoblin IIs and re-docked.